Friday, November 4, 2016

Ramachandra Guha’s column “A question of sources – The
unholy holy book of the RSS” (The
Telegraph, 17 Sep. 2016) draws attention to the fiftieth anniversary of a
major ideological manifesto of Hindu Nationalism: “Guru” Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar’s
book Bunch of Thoughts. After the
death of Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889-1940), who in 1925 had founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or “National
Volunteer Association”, the BHU-trained biologist Golwalkar (1906-73) was the
second Sarsanghchalak, “Chief Guide
of the Association”, until his own death. He is credited with greatly expanding
the RSS’s presence in Indian society by creating a Parivar (“family”) of specialized organizations, including a
pan-Hindu religious platform, a trade-union, a student organization, a network
for tribal welfare, and a political
party.

This party, the Bharatiya
Jan Sangh (BJS, “Indian People’s Association”), founded in 1951, was a
venture into explicit politics which Golwalkar agreed to against his wishes, after
the Hindu Mahasabha (“Hindu
Great-Council”, °1922) had irredeemably fallen from grace with the murder of
Mahatma Gandhi by one of its members. Reportedly, Golwalkar gave his consent to
the party’s creation with the words: “Alright then, a house also needs a
lavatory.” The party existed until 1977, when it fused with others to form the Janata Party (“People’s Party”), and was
reconstituted in 1980 as the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), the ruling party at the time of this writing.

The book’s title was inspired by Jawaharlal Nehru’s
collection Bunch of Old Letters,
effectively a “bunch” or random collection of disparate writings. This was not
the best choice for what was intended to be an ideological guidebook.

Books
in Hindu Nationalism

Guha misrepresents (probably because he misunderstands) the role of
books in the Sangh. His inference that the book somehow determines today's BJP
government's policies is a typical secularist fantasy, if only because the BJP
has emancipated itself from the RSS. Most BJP men today are not from the RSS,
and even the RSS men inside or outside the BJP have rarely read this Hindutva
manifesto. The short attention span of many Hindus (as an outsider, I would not
dare to say this, but Hindu intellectuals themselves keep on bewailing this
tendency) militates against reliance on hefty volumes like Bunch of Thoughts. Ploughing through demanding books is only given
to few, among ethnicities mainly the Chinese, Northern Europeans and Jews, and
even there not exactly the majority. Whenever you present a book to an RSS
leader, he is bound to say: "Can't you summarize this volume to a small
pamphlet?" (On the bright side, Hindu consciousness-raising is currently
getting a tremendous boost by the developments in communication technology: through
less demanding means like Twitter messages, and through the return to oral
culture, as in webinars.)

This aversion to reading is especially true in the RSS. This has a
historical cause as well as a conscious decision behind it. The historical cause
is the circumstances of the RSS’s founding: Dr. KB Hedgewar came from the
Bengal revolutionary faction of the Freedom Movement, and brought its secretive
methods along. Like the revolutionaries, wary of feeding written evidence of
their designs to police informers, RSS men never communicated in writing but
travelled around to pass information orally. Hence the enormous physical
locomotion performed by RSS officers. As the wife of an RSS veteran confided to
me: “It is a status symbol for them.”

The (indeed real) influence of Bunch
of Thoughts in RSS discourse is mainly through oral sermons by bauddhik officers selecting a few nice
passages. Most RSS men won't recognize the more difficult passages that Guha
draws grim conclusions from. It is like the Bible in Roman Catholicism, where
the raw passages are kept out of hearing distance: the flock is only fed the
elevating passages through selected Sunday readings.

There is a big difference between BJP texts of
thirty years ago and today, having become more sophisticated but also more
secularist and less Hindu. In BJP discourse, pace Guha, the term Hindu Rashtra (“Hindu State”), dear to
Golwalkar, is now unthinkable. While Congress has evolved from secular
nationalism to making common cause with the Breaking India forces, the BJP has
evolved from Hindu nationalism to secular nationalism. (Which, on the bright
side, makes it the natural party of government.) This is to a lesser extent
true of the RSS, but it is still closer to Golwalkar. However, the person-cult
of Golwalkar, still as strong as ever, is unrelated to the influence of Bunch of Thoughts. The RSS position
regarding Golwalkar's ideas might well evolve, all while the devotion to
Golwalkar remains the same. Secularist intellectuals like Guha may find this
absurd, but it is the reality.

We

Guha’s critique is certainly not the lowliest kind of
anti-Golwalkar polemic. In articles of that category, used unquestioningly as
source in the majority of introductions to Hindu Nationalism, the targeted
Golwalkar book would not be Bunch of
Thoughts (1966) but his slim maiden volume, We, Our Nationhood Defined (1939). That attempt at ideological
contemplation of the political challenges before Hindu society has earned
notoriety because of two overquoted passages. In one, Golwalkar is selectively
cited as seemingly supporting Nazi Germany. I have analysed this passage in the
context of the book and of its time (one chapter each in The Saffron Swastika, 2001, and Return
of the Swastika, 2006, or online at https://www.academia.edu/14793753/Disowning_Golwalkars_We),
and found this common allegation, present in every introductory text on
Hindutva, totally wanting. Thus, anti-Semitism was the core doctrine of
National-Socialism, yet the Jewish people was the foremost role model upheld by
Golwalkar for the “Hindu nation”. As for the Nazis’ militarism, he contrasts
Germany’s champions of martial virtues with the sages who form the Hindu role
models “in serene majesty”. This oft-quoted passage is irrelevant for the
contemporary debates, except to show to what mendaciousness secularists and
foreign India-watchers can stoop.

The other passage could have more to do with
contemporary politics. It clearly distinguishes Christians and Muslims from the
Hindus, as mere guests vis-à-vis the host society, entitled to protection and
an honourable life, but to nothing more. Golwalkar proposes that they
(“re”)-assimilate, or else accept a protected status as foreign residents “claiming
nothing, not even citizens’ rights”. Yet, as the book disappeared from
circulation in 1948 and Golwalkar vetoed its reprint for being “immature”, most
Sangh members have never even seen that line. It doesn’t reflect the current
party-line of the RSS let alone the BJP.

The only incriminating fact that still attaches to We is its disowning by the RSS. It
officially disowned the book in 2006, only confirming half a century of the
book’s factual non-existence, and with that decision, we have no quarrel. But
it also claimed, quite mendaciously, that the book had not been written by
Golwalkar and did not reflect his ideas. Nobody got fooled except the most
obedient among the RSS’s own volunteers.

Bunch

By contrast, the contents of Bunch of Thoughts remains a central part of most Sanghis’
ideological formation. The only book to rival it, is Deendayal Upadhyaya’s Integral Humanism (1965), adopted as
official ideology by the BJS and (after some confusion with “Gandhian
socialism”, finally agreed to be but another name for the same ideology) its
successor body, the BJP. If you would want to honestly criticize the BJP
through a book, it would be Upadhyaya’s Integral
Humanism, but even the sheer mention of that book is absent from the
immense majority of “expert” publications about the BJP. Bunch of Thoughts only plays a role for the party’s old guard that
was groomed in the RSS. The party has moved away from its parent body and most
members today don’t have an RSS past.

While Bunch of
Thoughts is of limited consequence to our evaluation of the presently
governing BJP’s policies, it has a historical link to the party and may of
course form the object of research. Without being fooled by the secularists
into thinking that any fault found in it can be applied to the party, we will
nonetheless take note of the Hindutva gems that Guha has discovered in it.

Golwalkar does indeed remain “the chief ideologue of
the organization”, meaning the RSS, and till today, his “bearded visage is
prominently displayed” at RSS functions. It may also be true that as an RSS
veteran, Prime Minister Narendra Modi “hugely admires Golwalkar”. Yet, in
general, it is a big stretch of Guha’s to claim that Bunch of Thoughts is “of enormous contemporary relevance” and is
for the ruling party what the Koran is for Muslims. Firstly, the RSS impact on
the BJP is limited and waning. Secondly, Islam is a “religion of the book” and
is heavily determined by the contents of the Koran, to which it explicitly pays
obeisance; but Hinduism is not that book-oriented, even when it pays plenty of
lip-service to the Scriptures.

This counts even more for its Hindutva variety. Indeed,
Golwalkar himself was emphatically anti-bookish and berated his volunteers when
they were caught “idling” by reading a book. More than anyone else, he is
responsible for the RSS’s anti-intellectual orientation, which has been very
consequential: (1) a complete absence from the public debate;(2) a propensity to make fools of themselves
with fantastic claims, e.g. that “ancient Indians had airplanes”, as if India’s
real contributions to science and technology weren’t good enough; (3) a
complete passivity when Nehruvians and Marxists moved in to to monopolize the
cultural and educational sphere; and (4) to really drive the negative
implications home, an utter inability to give a credible defence of Golwalkar’s
own books.

Nationalism

Golwalkar was a nationalist, and the movement he led,
is known worldwide as “Hindu Nationalism” till today. Contrary to what the
secularists allege these days, the RSS was very much rooted in the Freedom
Movement, in anti-colonial nationalism. It started as a security force to
protect a Congress meeting in 1925, and its founder, KB Hedgewar, had been
trained by the Bengali revolutionary wing of the Freedom Movement. (This
explains a working principle of the RSS, viz. its secretiveness and reliance on
direct communication.) Its slightly older sister, the Hindu Mahasabha (1922),
was originally a Hindu lobby within Congress.

This nationalism was a logical choice, at least in the
1920s. The immediate pressures from the anti-colonial struggle, and the
international after-effect of the national passions of the Great War, made
nationalism honourable and obligatory. Even associations for sports or music
took the habit of marching in uniform as if they were armies marching to the
battlefield. The RSS followed this pattern.

Emotionally, this nationalist appeal undoubtedly
works. Election campaigns fought on a national issues tend to unite the ciizens
around them, transcending and trumping the usual contests between collective
self-interests (commual, casteist or regional), which are divisive.

It is another
question whether it still is such a wise choice after 1945, when nationalism
got a bad name through its identification with the losing side in WW2; after
1947 and the decades of independence, when India has other concerns than its
relatively assured national freedom; after 1947 again, as the year when many
Hindus became citizens of the suddenly separate countries of Pakistan and (what
was to become) Bangladesh; after the resettlement of millions of Hindus abroad
and their acquisition of a foreign nationality (apart from those already in
Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and Afghanistan); and after
quite a few non-Indians have become Hindu. As I have argued elsewhere,
“nationalism is a misstatement of Hindu concerns”.

Thus, the reason why Muslim invaders destroyed Hindu
temples, was not that they were “foreign invaders”, as claimed in most RSS
pamphlets, for then they would have imposed “foreign temples” on the Hindu
sites. No, it was because they were Muslim,
a word avoided nowadays in RSS parlance, and they imposed mosques. In the discussions about Ghar Wapasi (“return home”), the reconversion of Christian converts
to Hinduism, promoted by the RSS, I often hear the justification:
“Christianization also entails Westernization” – as if Christianization without
Westernization were alright. But that is not the problem: Hindus themselves are
fast Westernizing (without the RSS-BJP doing anything against it), but this doesn’t
make them non- or anti-Hindu. And at least the Catholic missionaries are
responding to this complaint by “inculturation”, i.e. Christianization without
Westernization. So that is alright for the RSS: Indian Christians smashing
Hindu “idols”, as long as they duly wear dhoti?
For “nationalists”, blind to the religious dimension, it is.

Hindu
Rashtra

Why was the nation conceived as “Hindu” rather than
“Indian”? In Hedgewar’s analysis, Hindu society constituted the Indian nation,
while the minorities were mere guests. In older documents of the RSS and the
Jan Sangh, you still find this idea of a “Hindu nation”, as evidenced by the
oft-quoted Golwalkar sentence about minority inhabitants having “not even
citizens’ rights”. However, even then the RSS and the BJS adopted terms like Bharatiya (Indian) and Rashtriya (national), and thus prepared
the ground for a more recent shift away from Hindu identity politics and
towards “secular” or “inclusive” nationalism. This shift, very outspoken in the
BJP but also affecting the RSS, leads to inventive constructions such as that
of the Indian Muslims as “Mohammedi Hindus”, a term repeatedly insisted on by
LK Advani during the Ayodhya campaign of ca. 1990. Not that Indian Muslims will
ever accept this contradictory label, but their honest opinion is not asked. The
rationale for this term is the post-Golwalkar doctrine that “Hindu” is syonym
with “Indian”.

Earlier, “Indian” was reduced to “Hindu” (subtracting
any non-Hindu Indians from the “Indian” category, as in Golwalkar’s quotes
above), but in the RSS discourse of the last decades, “Hindu” is being reduced
to “Indian”. This purely geographical and thus “secular” notion was the meaning
of the Persian word “Hindu” fifteen hundred years ago. But when the Muslim
invaders imported it into India, it immediately had a religious meaning: all
Indian Pagans in the broadest sense, i.e. all those who were not Jews,
Christians or Muslims. This, then, is the original Indian meaning of Hindu: any
Indian Pagan, whether Brahmin, Shudra, Buddhist, Tribal or any other grouping
or denomination; but emphatically excluding Muslims and Christians. Since it is
the historically foundational meaning, those who insist on giving it a
different meaning, have the burden of justification on them. In this case, it
is the RSS that owes us, already for a few decades, a justification for its
absurd redefining of “Hindu” as simply “Indian”, including Christians and
Muslims.

Haven’t the “experts” on whom Guha relies, noticed
this shift in meaning of the all-important term “Hindu”? It explains, to name a
current and important example, the grim and determined passivity of the Modi
government regarding specificaly Hindu demands, such as the abolition of the
blatantly anti-Hindu (so, communally partisan and hence anti-secular) Right to
Education Act, which has forced hundreds of Hindu schools to close down. A
Hindu party would be up in arms against anti-Hindu discriminations (and the BJS
was, but did ot have the power), but in their present state of mind, the Hindu
movement simply cannot conceive of “anti-Hindu” discriminations anymore, as
this would mean “anti-Indian”.

A government advisor confided to me that the BJP now, having
learned its lesson from the AB Vajpayee government’s passivity on Hindu issues,
wants to “keep the pot boiling”. It wants to throw some crumbs to its Hindu
constituency, such as a punitive strike against Pakistani terrorist camps, to
buy sufficient loyalty from its Hindu support base; but without doing anything
substantive on important Hindu demands. The most important of these is not
risky projects pregnant with communal violence, such as the Common Civil Code
dear to the erstwhile BJS, but the perfectly reasonable and secular abolition
of all legal and constitutional discriminations against Hinduism. (I invite the
BJP to prove me wrong, not with denunciations but with legislative action.)

This shift also means that both organizations, the BJP
formally and the RSS effectively, have renounced one of Golwalkar’s core ideas:
Hindu Rashtra, the “Hindu state”
(though the RSS used to fussily insist that it means an ill-defined “Hindu
nation” instead). It was an un-Hindu idea to start with: the Gupta or Chola
empire or any other premodern Hindu political entity was coronated with Hindu
rites and facilitated Vedic and Puranic traditions, but never called itself Hindu Rashtra. Further, Hindu states
have always been pluralistic, regardless of the ruler’s personal orientation.

In India this is now termed ”secular”, an infelicitous
term deviant from its original meaning of “non-religious” or “not acknowledging
as consequential any religious identities”; but one that has been accepted by
the RSS itself in its 1990’s slogan: “Hindu India, secular India”. By the RSS’s
own post-Golwalkar logic, Hindu Rashtra,
when analysed, would only mean: “a (genuinely) secular state”. Why then uphold
a Hindu Rashtra as a distant goal in
contradistinction to the present principle (admittedly very imperfect in its
realization) of a secular republic? Golwalkar’s and the present RSS
leadership’s positions on this question, and the probable difference between
the two, would make an excellent topic for a thorough intra-RSS debate,
followed by an authoritative publication explaining the whole question in
detail and finally offering clarity. Are they capable of doing this?

India’s
unity

Unlike Jawaharlal Nehru, Golwalkar didn’t see this
nationhood as a project, a “nation in the making”, but as an ancient heritage: "Long before the West had learnt to eat roast meat instead of raw,
we were one nation, with one motherland." Indeed, in many RSS writings, it
is claimed that the Vedic expression matrbhumi,
“motherland”, meant “India”, in the sense of “the Subcontinent”.

That is not true, but the belief has a long
tradition. A close reading of the Vedas shows a geographical
horizon stretching from roughly Prayag to the Afghan frontier. The only Vedic
seer credited with crossing the Vindhya mountains was Agastya, and that was
noticed precisely because it was an exceptional adventure, not a visit to a
province of his familiar motherland. In the Mahabharata,
an epic based on a historical war of succession in the Vedic Bharata dynasty
ca. 1400 BC, the geographical ambit of the events and persons involved is
similarly limited. Yet, by the time of the final editing, around the time of
Christ, dynasties from the farthest ends of India had had themselves written
into the narrative. They wanted to belong to the expanding Vedic civilization,
which is also why they invited Brahmin families and donated land to them, in
order to have them confer Vedic legitimacy on their dynasties.

Not since a God-given eternity, but at least for
more than 2000 years, all of the Subcontinent has had a sense of unity. This is
far more than most countries can say, and it is enough to justify its political
unity today. The pilgrimage cycles, the narration of the same epics in village
squares all over the country, and the visible presence of the otherwise
self-contained Brahmin caste and the monastic orders, created a degree of
self-conscious cultural unity. This sometimes approached but never fully
reached political unity, which at any rate only concerned the elites: changing
borders made little difference to ordinary life. Clearly, poliical unity
existed at least as an ideal.

Fact
is that here, Golwalkar gave utterance to a feeling common among Indians.
Whatever the details about the past, Indians believe in national unity. And
this is not a nationalism “in the making”, on the contrary: the Nehruvian
elites dish out all kinds of reasons why not Indianness but the separate
communal identities are “real”, yet when push comes to shove, Indians stand
united.Before the Chinese attacked
in 1962, Tamil Nadu was in the grip of separatist fervour; but when the
invasion came, the Tamils, all while remaining wedded to the Dravidianist
cultural demands, abandoned the separatist camp and threw their lot in with
India. Also, history shows that the surest way to win an election lies in
having just won an Indo-Pak war. The local and communal identities are
real, but so is the “national” identity.

Hence Guha’s
Golwalkar quotation: "Hindu Society developed in an all-comprehensive
manner, with a bewildering variety of phases and forms, but with one thread
of unification running inherently through the multitude of expressions and
manifestations." Here Golwalkar’s observation is impeccable, though I
would call this unity “civilizational” rather than “national”. Guha
comments: “What precisely this unifying thread was is never defined.” Well,
it is Hinduism. This is a vague and capacious notion, but adequate enough
to explain India’s self-conscious unity.

Guha’s Golwalkar – 2

(Pragyata, October 2016)

In part 1, we saw
Ramachandra Guha drawing grim conclusions from the supposed influence of MS
Golwalkar’s 50-year-old book Bunch of
Thoughts on the ruling party. Here we discuss some more aspects of
Golwalkar’s vision that, in Guha’s understanding, should be cause for
worry.

World Teacher

According to
Ramachandra Guha, another “assumption that Golwalkar works with is that
despite their fallen state today, Hindus are destined to lead and guide the
world”. He cites Guruji as asserting that it "is the grand
world-unifying thought of Hindus alone that can supply the abiding basis
for human brotherhood", so that world leadership, no less, "is a
divine trust, we may say, given to the charge of the Hindus by
Destiny".

It is not as if
other nations are waiting for India’s contribution. Then again, what they
did take or accept from India was the most precious contribution. China had
no mean philosophy sprung out of its own soil, but nonetheless accepted and
integrated Buddhism. Among the Greek philosophers, Pythagoras and later the
neo-Platonists were but the most explicit in copying Indian concepts and
even practices, and they influenced the whole of European philosophy a well
as a bit of Christian theology. A much later revolution in European thought
was wrought by Immanuel Kant, who admitted the decisive influence
(“awakened from my dogmatic slumber”) from David Hume’s sudden development
of a quasi-Buddhist view. Hume doesn’t mention Buddhism, and would perhaps
have been laughed out of court if he had, but recently we have discovered that
his philosophical awakening had been triggered by his reading two detailed
accounts of Buddhist thought by Catholic missionaries posted in Tibet c.q.
Thailand. Modern thinkers like AN Whitehead, CG Jung and Ken Wilber tapped
directly into Indian thoughts and practices, even if not always
acknowledging it (an attitude discussed by Rajiv Malhotra in his innovative
thesis of the “U-turn”).

On the other
hand, translating this natural attractiveness of Indian traditions for
outsiders into a missionary spirit is not very Hindu either. When real
Evangelists meet someone from a different religion, immediately their
missionary mechanic sets to work: what buttons are there in him that I can
click to make him open to my message? Hindus don’t have this at all. When
they meet someone from a strange religion, they become naturally curious.
They feel no need to destroy that foreign religion and replace it with
Hinduism, but assume that there must be a core of wisdom in it, something
essentially the same as what makes Hindus tick.

Moreover,
this international appeal as a “world teacher” sits uncomfortably with
Golwalkar’s nationalism. It is now the need of the hour to stress that
Indian contributions are really from India (against e.g. American attempts
to obscure the Sanskrit terms and Indian references in yoga), and that in
some respects India has indeed been a "world teacher". But apart
from that, the further propagation of Indian contributions abroad, as of
foreign contributions inside India, will go on for some time. In a footnote
of their schoolbooks, the brighter among Chinese or European or
Latin-American pupils will still learn that yoga originates in India, or
that the zero originates in India, but otherwise it will simply be part of
their own life, c.q. their own mathematics. Just like rocket science
came from Germany, the train from England, gun powder from China,
and mankind from Africa. So many world teachers!

The Buddha’s cosmopolitanism

Like most Hindus,
Golwalkar praised the Buddha. The Buddhists, by contrast, he accuses of
beginning to “uproot the age-old national traditions of this land. The
great cultural virtues fostered in our society were sought to be
demolished." It could have made sense to accuse the Buddhists of
neglecting certain virtues because they emphasized other virtues more. A slightly
earlier Hindu Nationalist, VD Savarkar, had already considered the Buddhist
(but not Buddhist alone) value of non-violence harmful for India’s defence.
But the destructive design of “seeking to demolish” anything of value is
not normally associated with Buddhism. While there is no doubt that
foreigners were important in the history of Buddhism, especially the
Indo-Greeks (Menander/Milinda) and the Kushanas (Kanishka), Golwalkar
surprises us with the information that "devotion to the nation and its
heritage had reached such a low pitch that the Buddhist fanatics invited
and helped the foreign aggressors who wore the mask of Buddhism. The
Buddhist sect had turned a traitor to the mother society and the mother
religion."

This is bad
history, and rather nasty towards the Buddhist fellow-Indians. But we can
agree that Buddhism never set great store by defending India’s borders,
which were not threatened in the north or east, where the Buddha lived and
worked. The northwestern frontier was known to the Buddha, and indeed
culturally familiar, not felt to be a foreign land at all, for his friends
Prasenajit and Bandhula had studied there, at Takshashila University. (Yes,
it existed before Buddhism: contrary to the Nehruvian received wisdom, the
university as an institution was not a Buddhist but a Vedic invention.) But
he was not in the business of defending it: at that very time it was not
threatened either, and he indeed had other priorities anyway. But neither
he nor his followers ever shot anyone in the back who felt called upon to
fight aggressors.

Something similar
counts for other Indian sects. The Vedas and Epics report a number of wars,
but never a defence against foreign aggression. Once there was real
aggression, by Mohammed Ghori, defender Prithviraj Chauhan was betrayed by
Jayachandra, the latter as much a Hindu as the former. They were aware of
some cultural unity stretching from Attock to Cuttack, but politically they
were attached to their own part of the Subcontinent, and to hell with the
neighbours. The RSS notion of a Deshbhakt (“patriot”, “devotee of the
country”, meaning a devotee of the whole Subcontinent) did not exist in
premodern Hinduism.

Sects with any
kind of spiritual goal had another purpose than nationalism: Liberation, Self-Realization,
Knowledge, Isolation (of Consciousness from Nature), Awakening, or anything
the different sects chose to call the ultimate state of consciosness. None
of the classical manuals for the seekers of the ultimate mention India. If
in recent centuries it does come up by way of geographical detail, it is
still not invest with value pertaining to their goal. The Motherland is
where you come from, a natural given; not where you go to, not the norm you
aspire to reach. It is just there.

Then again, you
do get the notion of India as a Punyabhumi, a territory fit for earning
merit, which you have to purify yourself to re-enter after a stay abroad.
Here you get the bridge between Hindu spirituality and Hindu nationalism.
In my opinion, like in that of cosmopolitan secularists, this was a
degenerative trend, but as an outsider I don’t want to tell Hindus what to
do or to believe. So here we do have to admit that Golwalkar had a
traditional basis for his assertion of India’s uniqueness.

Caste

Buddhism had come
into the limelight in 1956, shortly before the book was written: with Dr.
BR Ambedkar’s adoption of, or (in Guha’s borrowed-Christian construction of
the event) “conversion” to Buddhism. Ambedkar had wanted to show a fist to
caste Hinduism, yet that did not make him into a "traitor to the
mother society and the mother religion", on the contrary: he
explicitated that conversion to a foreign religion would harm the nation,
which he did not want, hence his embracing a sect born in India. As
Savarkar had commented: Ambedkar’s “refuge” in Bauddha Dharma was “a sure
jump into the Hindu fold”. That is why the RSS, thanks to advancing
insight, has gradually included Ambedkar in its pantheon. But that
development was not on the horizon yet under Guruji. Guha correctly notes
that Golwalkar “does not so much as mention the great emancipator of the
Dalits”.

For people
involved in a crusade against Hinduism, like the Nehruvian secularists, it
was a foregone conclusion that whatever a Hindu leader ever wrote, he would
most of all be judged for his position on caste. That this will always be a
negative judgment, is an equally foregone conclusion. Hinduism, for them,
is “caste, wholly caste, and nothing but caste”. This implies that a
nominal Hindu is deemed to have turned against his religion if he takes an
approvedly egalitarian position; only then is he the good guy. If he spits
on his Mother, bravo! But if he chooses to defend Hinduism, as Golwalkar
does, every possible position he takes will always be deemed an intolerable
discrimination on caste lines. Even if he pronounces himself in favour of
full equality, he is still lambasted for being patronizing and exercising
his “Brahmin privilege”.

According to
Guha, “Golwalkar vigorously defends the caste system, saying that it kept
Hindus united and organized down the centuries.” Yet, what follows is
something else than a “vigorous defence”, it is a nuanced historical
understanding that a social system at variance with modern homogenizing
nationalism may yet have had its historical advantages: "On the one
hand, the so-called 'caste-ridden' Hindu Society has remained undying and
unconquerable... after facing for over two thousand years the depredations
of Greeks, Shakas, Hunas, Muslims and even Europeans, by one shock of which,
on the other hand, the so-called casteless societies crumbled to dust never
to rise again." Whether a causal relation can be established between
caste and the survival of Hinduism, should be investigated, but it is a
reasonable hypothesis that deserves better than Guha’s blanket
condemnation.

“Bunch of Thoughts altogether ignores
the suppression of Dalits and women in Hindu society.” Look at these double
standards. Pray, Mr. Guha, show me a book written in defence of Islam that
expounds on the mistreatment of women in Islam. After you have done that,
you may ask this very similar question about Hinduism. As a prolific
writer, have you published anything about the oppression of women in
Christianity, a critique developed by the very originators of feminism in the
world? Why do you single out Hinduism here? We have never seen you ask
feminist authors why they haven’t contributed anything to the struggle for
Hinduism’s self-respect against its many enemies, so why the reverse?
Further, we may speculate that the women’s viewpoint just didn’t occur to Golwalkar
as a confirmed bachelor leading an all-male organization; and that in the
India of the 1960s, women’s issues were not as high-profile as today.

By contrast,
caste inequality has continuously been on the agenda in the Indian
republic. Golwalkar was not silent about it, but gave much less prominence
to caste than anti-Hindu authors do, who assume that “Hinduism is caste,
wholly caste, and nothing but caste”. RSS veterans who still knew Golwalkar
in person told me he took a nationalist and non-conflictual view of the
issue: as a nationalist, he believed in the minimization of all divisive
factors and in a large measure of equality for all members of the Hindu
nation, but not in social engineering, much less in quota or reparative
discrimination (“affirmative action”). Thus, when a Brahmin neophyte at
first refused to eat together with the other castes, he allowed him to eat
separately, until he was familiar enough with the RSS attitude that he
himself came around to eating with the others. That way, his acceptance of
inter-caste commensality was much better anchored then if imposed on him. The
RSS boasts of being the only caste-free civil organization in India. By
contrast, the political parties that for historical reasons call themselves
“anti-caste”, practise naked caste advocacy. They typically are informal or
even self-designated interest groups of a particular group of castes.

Communalism

Guha accuses
Golwalkar of paranoia vis-à-vis Indian Muslims and Indian Christians, and
quotes him: "What is the attitude of those people who have been
converted to Islam and Christianity? They are born in this land, no doubt.
(…) Do they feel it a duty to serve her? No! Together with the change in
their faith, gone are the spirit of love and devotion to the nation."

The memory of the
Partition was still fresh, and of the fact that a vast majority of the Muslim
electorate had voted for it. The missionaries too had considered it likely
that with Independence, India would lapse into chaos, so that some
Christian-dominated areas in Kerala and the Northeast could declare their
independence. It had also been noticed in the Northeast that
non-Christianized tribals gave “Indian” as nationality to census officers,
while Christians gave their tribal identity. So, Golwalkar’s suspicion of
the minority, while not to be accepted like that, still had a core of truth
in it.

Then, Guha goes
in for the kill: “There is a striking affinity between the questions
Golwalkar asks here and those asked by European anti-Semites in the 19th
and early 20th centuries. French, German and British nationalists all
suspected the Jews in their country of not being loyal enough to the
motherland.” Aha! So Golwalkar was a Nazi after all!

Well, not
exactly. First of all, before the Jews became the object of World
Conspiracy suspicions, the allegation of a foreign or international loyalty
originally concerned not the Jews but the Catholics, with the Jesuit Order
as their main weapon of aggression. The Protestants, somewhat like the
Orthodox Christians, were organized nationally and accepted docrinal
differences, at least within the confines laid down by the Bible; by
contrast, the Catholic Church was a global monolith with aspirations for
world domination. My own country, Belgium, was a Catholic frontline state, with
institutions for Irish, English and Dutch Catholics to support them and
eventually allow them to topple the Protestant domination of their
countries. There were also real-life incidents that nurtured the suspicion
of a Popish Plot, most famously the “gunpowder plot” by Jesuit agent Guy
Fawkes to blow up the British Parliament. So, there was a core of truth to
those suspicions.Even in
demography, these suspicions were not baseless. As late as the 1950s, Dutch
Protestants used to warn: “Be careful with those Catholics, with their
large families they may overtake our country.” And indeed, today the
percentage of Catholics is larger than that of Protestants,-- only, between
them, they are not even the majority anymore, and the Protestant-Catholic dichotomy
has become irrelevant. Also, the Cathoic birthrate has plummeted to the
national average.

The suspicion of
a Jewish World Conspiracy was mainly based on a forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
originally fabricated by the Czarist secret police, though dispproved of by
the Czar himself. When Islam critics in the West point out that Islam has
ambitions for world domination, the Guhas in our midst try to be funny and
allege that we fantasize, after the same model, a “Protocols of Mecca”. No:
the Zion Protocols were a
forgery, the so-called Mecca
Protocols for world domination are real. The Quran itself, authoritative
for every single Muslim (though ignored by many, fortunately but
un-Islamically), says: “War will reign between us until ye believe in Allah
alone.” The Jewish Bible has a doctrine of domination too, but only of the
Promised Land; while the Quran speaks of world domination.

So, the
difference between the anti-Jewish and the anti-Islamic suspicion is one
between a falsity and reality. I am aware that for propagandists, reality
doesn’t count, only perception does. With the studied superficiality
typical of Nehruvian secularism, the seemingly similar perception of the
anti-Jewish versus the anti-Islamic suspicion is enough. They can throw
that around as a grave allegation, as here in Guha’s article, and be
confident that no one will step in to correct them. The endless
mendaciousness of the secularists would have been remedied to a large
extent if there had been a counterparty capable of responding to them and
diagnosing their errors. But the only counterparty to be reckoned with was
the Hindu Nationalists, and they had been fixed in argumentative impotence
by Golwalkar himself.

Christians have a
similar doctrine of world conquest, though less confrontational. In its
formative first centuries, Chrristianity lived as a minority in the vast
Roman Empire, and unlike Islam, it had to accomodate national laws not of
its own making. This fitted Saint Paul’s repudiation of the Biblical Law:
it is the spirit (viz. of charity) that counts, not the letter of the law.
This means that Christianity became naturally secular: it separated the
religious sphere, thoroughly Christian, from the worldly and political sphere,
dominated by non-Christian forces. During the heyday of Christian power,
Christianity impinged ever more on the political sphere, but in the modern
era, it did not have too much difficulty returning to its original
“secularist” position of accepting the separate identity of the political
sphere. A telling criterion: comparatively few people were killed in the
struggle to wrest worldly power from the Churches, compared e.g. to the
struggle between secular ideologies in the 20th century. And in this struggle,
the secular forces were more violent than the Christian forces, witness the
French Revolutionary genocide in the Vendée or the persecution of
Christianity in the Soviet Union.

However, in a
more moderate and sophisticated way, Christianity does have an ambition of
world domination too. Like in Islam, all non-believers are deemed to go to
hell, though few Christians now take this seriously anymore. Jesus’
injunction to “go and teach all nations” means that India too is on
Christianity’s conversion programme. When the Pope came to India in 1999,
he said openly and in so many words that his Church wanted to “reap a great
harvest of faith” in Asia, which implies destroying Hinduism the way the
native religions of Europe and the Americas were destroyed. He thereby
badly let his secularist allies down, for they had always ridiculed the
Hindu Nationalist suspicion that Christianity only meant destruction for
Hinduism. Yet, after being put in the wrong so bluntly, here is the
secularist Guha again shamelessly ridiculing Golwalkar’s suspicion against
Christianity.

On one point,
though, Golwalkar is blatantly wrong: it is not India that the Christians
want to destroy, but Hinduism. Here again, nationalism is a misstatement of Hindu concerns. Not the nation
is their target, but the religion. Christians were loyal to the Roman
empire, of which the 5th-centuriy Germanic enemies were already Christian
too, but when the Empire fell apart, they adapted: after all, their main
loyalty was not a political structure but a religion. And then they became
loyal citizens of Wisigothic Spain, of Ostrogothic Italy, of Frankish
France, a political loyalty that was inevitably secondary. They were not
Deshbhakt, they were Yesubhakt. And similarly, they sing the Indian anthem
with as much conviction as their Indian compatriots. And they will do so
even more when they come to live in a “post-Hindu India” (of which
Christian convert Kancha Ilaiah dreams). But if a different political
structure comes to replace the Indian Republic, they will effortlessly
adapt to that too. Defending the nation against the Christian onslaught
leaves their real target undefended: the Hindu religion.

Gandhi

Guha quotes
Golwalkar as asserting that "the foremost duty laid upon every Hindu
is to build up such a holy, benevolent and unconquerable might of our Hindu
People in support of the age-old truth of our Hindu Nationhood". This
was never said in the Upanishads, it is not part of the fabled Hindu
spirituality. But then, Hinduism has survived because of other factors than
spirituality. At times it is simply right to emphasize the martial virtues.
Proof a contrario: Buddhism was
purely about spirituality and didn’t practise self-defence, so when it was
really attacked, during the Muslim invasions, it was wiped away from
Central Asia and India in one go. In spite of Golwalkar’s unhistorical view
of “Hindu Nationhood”, he was right to extol the project of “unconquerable
might”.

Guha compares
this “supremacist point of view” with what M.K. Gandhi regarded as the duty
of Hindus: “to abolish untouchability and to end the suppression of women”,
and to “promote inter-religious harmony”. Indeed, Mr. Guha, “there could
not be two visions of what it takes to be a Hindu, or an Indian, that are
as radically opposed as those offered by Golwalkar and Gandhi respectively”.

There are several
things wrong with this picture. Factually, it is not true that the Mahatma
opposed “suppression of women”; on the contrary, he notoriously practised
it. Perhaps his wife Kasturba accomodated the arrangements Gandhi imposed
on her, but there cannot possibly be an illusion that their relation was
one of equality. Towards his wife as well as his children, he was an
unmitigated family tyrant. His relation to the young women with whom he
carried out his “experiments with chastity” was also perversely
exploitative.

As for untouchability,
Gandhi made it his priority, and at that junction in history it was indeed
a necessity; but to make it a defining trait of Hinduism is simply wrong.
For thousands of years, Hindu society didn’t know of hereditary
untouchability, which is not mentioned in the Rg-Veda (and no, you shrill
screamers out there, not even in the Purusha Sukta). Later it did, and was
comfortable with it. For opposite reasons, Hindus in those periods were not
preoccupied with abolishing untouchability: first because it wasn’t there,
then because they thought it was alright. One can be a Hindu without
practising untouchability, but also without being fired up to abolish
untouchability. Today’s Hindu communities I know in Holland
(Bhojpuri-speaking Rama worshippers from Surinam) have only the faintest
notion of caste and none of untouchability, but are very much Hindu. In the
same spirit, the RSS ranks were not tainted with untouchability either. In
that respect, Golwalkar’s vision was different from but by no means
“radically opposed” to Gandhiji’s.

Abolishing
untouchability is a good thing to do, but it is not the essence of
Hinduism, nor of anti-Hinduism. Hinduism is a lot more and a lot bigger
than caste. It is only the ignorant Nehruvians who can’t pronounce the word
“Hindu” without manoeuvering the word “caste” into the same sentence. If
Gandhi put an unusual stress on this, it may have been a necessity of the
times, and that is not what I want to hold against him. What was wrong with
him, however, was that, regardless of caste, he had a very warped view of
Hinduism.

Thus, Gandhi was
wrong to equate Hinduism with non-violence, which is extolled as a virtue
on the spiritual path, but not a virtue for the warrior. No matter how the
warrior class is recruited, at any rate it is deemed necessary in the real
world. Hinduism is a complete system: it accounts for society’s needs as
much as for the requirements of the spiritual path. Gandhi’s version of
Hinduism was very unbalanced and morbidly moralistic. It ought to be a
warning sign for Hindus that the secularists are so insistently dangling
Gandhi as a role model before them.

Likewise,
“interreligious harmony” was a natural practice between the many sects
within Hinduism, and partly even towards Christianity and Islam. When
Muslims pass a mosque, they greet it, but not a temple or church. It is
only Hindus who greet any building or object that is deemed sacred to
anyone. This was the practice long before Gandhi. But these Hindus, or
certainly their intellectual vanguard, had the power of discrimination,
sharpened by their many debates between the different sects. Being nice to
Muslims and sympathizing with the piety that finds its expression in prayer
or fasting, is different from assenting to the illusory Islamic doctrine,
starting with the funny belief that Mohammed was God’s exclusive spokesman.
In Gandhi’s days, this critical role vis-à-vis Christianity and (at the
cost of a number of murders) Islam was taken by the Arya Samaj, which Gandhi
lambasted. His role in this regard was entirely negative, abolishing the
power of discrimination in the Hindu worldview. He thus prepared the ground
for the wilful superficiality characteristic of the Nehruvians. He also,
through his wider inflence on all Hindus, prepared the ground for the
complete ideological illiteracy among RSS men, along with Golwalkar.

The differences
between Gandhi and Golwalkar are dwarfed by one overriding influence on
their Hindu contemporaries that they had in common. It is that both of them
sold a voguish Western import as quintessentially Hindu. Gandhi’s view of
non-violence came from some quietist Christian sects. Remaining unmoved and
without fighting back when thugs manhandle you, is typical for the Amish and
similar Christian pacifist sects. Through Tolstoy and other exalted
Christians, Gandhi inserted a lot of Christian infuence into Hinduism. Similarly,
Golwalkar’s nationalism was a belated import of a 19th-century influence,
particularly through the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, whose
political manifesto had been translated by VD Savarkar. Today in the West,
nationalism has gone out of fashion; but in India, nothing ever dies, and
so nationalism keeps on working its distortive influence on the movement
for Hindu self-defence.

What Hindus
should urgently do, is to forget both Gandhi and Golwalkar. (That means two
idols less on Narendra Modi’s house altar.) Gandhi is now only artificially
kept alive by the secularists and some sentimental Hindus, purely for Hindu
consumption. (Nobody is telling the Muslims that Gandhiji was there for them
too, and that they should emulate his very Christian message of turning the
other cheek.) The problem is not that what they imported, came from abroad.
As the late Bal Thackeray said: “You cannot take this Swadeshi [= own produce, economic nationalism] thing too far, for then you would have to
do without the light bulb.” So, if Gandhi’s moralistic sentimentalism or
deliberate lack of discrimination had something positive to offer, we
shouldn’t mind it being of Christian origin. If Golwalkar’s nationalism
helped in properly diagnosing the problems facing Hindu society, we should
not complain of its Italian origin. But the thing is that they are not beneficial
at all; or if they ever were, they definitely have outlived their untility.

Another very
important thing they had in common, was their emphasis on emotions, as opposed
to thought. As RSS activists are wont to say: “Do you need to read a book
to love your mother?” Working on the emotions quickly creates a popular
appeal: both Gandhi and Golwalkar were hugely successful at getting crowds
marching. The Marxists were never equally popular, but more successful in
determining actual policies. They worked on people’s minds instead, and
that had a more penetrative and lasting effect.

Instead of
following false prophets like Gandhi and Golwalkar, Hindus had better
return to their real role models: to Dirghatamas and Vasishtha, to Rama and
Krishna, to Canakya and Thiruvalluvar, to Vishnu Sharma and Abhinavagupta,
to Ramdas and Shivaji. Their contribution in ideology and the art of living
should be made relevant to the present, they had everything in them that we
need. Hindus should not follow Western categories, like “national” vs.
“anti-national”, or like “Left” vs. “Right”, not because they have been
imported, but because because by now they have been sufficiently put to the
test and found wanting.

Vanguard of Hindu society

According to
Ramachandra Guha, the RSS fancies itself the vanguard of Hindu society: “Golwalkar
further assumes that if Hindus are destined to lead the world, the RSS is
destined to lead the Hindus.”

In better days,
and even recently, the rest of the world has eagerly drunk from Mother
India’s nipples. In spite of all her defects, she has a lot to offer, and
this has been proven already from the distant past onwards. This much is
indisputable. By contrast, the RSS’s claim to leadership over the Hindus
(or more up-to-date, over the Indians) is a tall claim that deserves to be
put to the test.

Certainly, the
RSS does a lot of good work at the basic level. Best known in India, though
passed over in silence by the world media in emulation of the English media
in India, is their disaster relief work. This indeed cannot be praised too
much, if only to compensate for the culpable silence about it in every
anti-Hindutva article, including this one by Guha. Whenever a flood or
earthquake strikes, RSS men immediately come on the scene and do the
thankless jobs that secularists feel themselves too precious for.

It is all the
more tragic that all these constructive energies of millions of ordinary
Hindu volunteers are not channeled towards a higher goal. The RSS at one
time wanted to serve Hindu society; today it is only busy perpetuating
itself. The RSS leadership has failed to set useful and attainable goals
for Hindu society. It has failed to map the Kurukshetra or do a SWOT
(strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis of the different
forces in the field. According to the ancient Chinese strategist Sunzi,
knowing both your enemy and yourself yields constant victory, knowing only
one of the two sometimes yields victory and sometimes defeat, and not
knowing either will end in assured and ignominious defeat. By this
criterion, the RSS, in spite of its size, is headed for complete defeat.

And effectively,
for advertising itself as the “vanguard” of Hindu society, the RSS has
little to show. Is India more Hindu today than in 1925? Several parameters
show a definite decline: demographic percentage of Hindus; percentage of
Hindu-controllod schools (not to speak of the hard-to-quantify degree of
Hinduness of those schools); percentage of Subcontinental territory where
Hindus can live with honour; percentage of soil and other assets controlled
by Hindu temples; percentage of men who wear dhotis or of women who wear
saris; and the proportion of conversions to the different religions
relative to their demographic weight.

Ah, the RSS will say
with a triumphant smile, at least we managed to bring our political party
to power! Yes they did, and that precisely is where you can see their
failure. Just compare the programme with which the BJS started in 1951 and
the actual policies of the BJP in power. Rather than Hinduizing secularist
India, the Hindu party has been secularized. In 1947, the Hindu forces
deplored the inclusion of the green colour in the Indian flag; but by 1980,
they themselves put green into their party flag. This is a visual symbol of
how they now wholeheartedly support what they originally condemned as
“minority appeasement”.

Let me state at
this point what has made me write this article. A BJP worker of RSS
background asked me to write a reply to this article by Guha. In response,
I pooh-poohed Bunch of thoughts: while not endorsing Guha’s critique, I
still expressed my skepticism of Golwalkar’s worldview. He got angry with
me, a case of “turning a good man into an angry man” by banking too much on
his goodwill and understanding. I owed this man a lot, and it was rude and
inconsiderate of me to belittle his Guru like that. I sincerely apologize
for it, and I hope to repair it a little bit by writing this
counter-critique.

Yet, at the same
time, I cannot help noticing that this incident at the personal level is a
very small part of the very large tragedy wilfully wrought for decades on
end by the RSS leadership, including Golwalkar. There cannot bet wo
opinions about the idealism and loyalty of numerous RSS men; but the leadership
has channeled this enormous reservoir of constructive energies towards
nothing better than the RSS itself. What their own rank and file had
assumed to be a service to Hindu civilization, is diverted away from that
goal. If the RSS had not existed, many of those activists would not have
found an outlet fort heir dedication to the Hindu cause. Yet, many others
would have set up their own initiatives, and the net result is that the
Hindu cause ould have advanced much further than where it has landed uder RSS
tutelage.

India’s unitary structure

Ramachandra Guha
raises the issue of the Constitution’s place in the Hindu Nationalist
scheme of things: “Narendra Modi may swear that the Indian Constitution is
his only holy book, but his guruji, Golwalkar, believed that
document to be deeply flawed and that it must be rejected or at least
redrafted”. The logical conclusion would be that after fifty years,
Golwalkar’s ideas have given way to new ideas. That Modi, in spite of his
personal veneration for his Guruji, had evolved away from Golwalkar’s
opinions. But instead, the same way committed Muslims always go back to the
Quran and live as if in 7th-century Arabia, Guha expects Modi to live by
the old book, without any changes.

Guha quotes Bunch of Thoughts: "The framers
of our present Constitution also were not firmly rooted in the conviction
of our single homogeneous nationhood." He thinks Golwalkar “was angry
that India was constituted as a Union of states, for in his view the
federal structure would sow ‘the seeds of national disintegration and
defeat’.”

The framers did
indeed sow the seeds of divisive politics steered by sectional interests,
though not with their purely symbolic definition of India. On the other
hand, their responsibility should not be exaggerated: a good political
structure is not all-powerful and cannot indefinitely prevent the eruption
of divisive tendencies. Golwalkar’s obsession with this “single homogeneous
nationhood” is historically incorrect, but so is the Constitution’s claim
that “India is a Union of States”. An example of a union of states is the
European Union, where separately existing countries threw in their lot
together. Or the budding United States, where thirteen separate British
colonies, upon their gaining independence, formed a union. In India, even
the nominally independent princely states were effectively part of British
India, so the Indian Republic was but a continuation of an existing unitary
political entity.

According to
Guha, “Golwalkar wanted the Centre to be all-powerful. Modi may now speak
of the virtues of co-operative federalism, but his guru, Golwalkar,
wrote of the need ‘to bury deep for good all talk of a federal structure of
our country’s Constitution’.” Here again, we see that Modi simply, and
quite normally, doesn’t follow the Book written by Golwalkar. In this
respect, though, Modi does stand in a Hindu tradition and even a BJP
tradition, from which Golwalkar was deviating. Ancient Hindu empires had to
respect each vassal-state’s swadharma: it had its own ways, and even the
inclusion i a larger political structure should not interrupt that
vassal-state’s attachment to its distinctive ways.

As for modern
India and the BJP, the AB Vajpayee government split the states of Bihar,
Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh to give political expression to the
relative distinctiveness of the Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and Uttarkhand
areas. It also extended recognition as official language to several
“tribal” languages. Like in some other respects, Golwalkar’s and the RSS’s
view deviates from the wise Hindu attitude encapsulating the wisdom of
millennia. Modi sets an example for all RSS followers by abandoning the
pro-monolithic Golwalkar view and re-embracing the Hindu tradition of
pluralism and differentiation.

An unexpected
positive side to Golwalkar’s stand is that it is more democratic in spirit
than Modi’s or anyone else’s veneration for the Constitution: "Let the
Constitution," he insisted, "be re-examined and re-drafted, so as
to establish [a] Unitary form of Government." Regardless of his
doubtful concern for the unitary form of government, he very correctly
refused to worship the Constitution. In a democracy, laws are a human
product, which we can choose to keep unchanged or to amend. They are not
above us, we ourselves make them. Modi had better stop treating the
Constitution as holy writ and give it a critical look to see for himself
that some articles in there are undesirable and in need of being
amended.

Conclusion

Ramachandra Guha
concludes thus: “No one who reads Bunch of Thoughts can reach a
conclusion other than the one the (entirely representative) quotes offered
above suggest -- namely, that its author was a reactionary bigot, whose
ideas and prejudices have no place in a modern, liberal democracy. If ever
the prime minister has the courage to give an unscripted, no-holds-barred
press conference, the first question an honest journalist should ask him
would be, ‘Sir, how do you reconcile your (long-standing) admiration for
Golwalkar on the one hand with your (new-found) respect and regard for
Ambedkar and Gandhi on the other?’"

Guha’s passing
assurance of representativeness is false. Just as has happened in the usual
references to Golwalkar’s book We,
here too passages have been cherry-picked for the virtue of making him look
bad. Bunch of Thoughts is a
repetitive and mediocre book, but is on the whole rather harmless. It
rarely raises the reader’s indignation. If it were not like that, i.e. if
things with the book were as bad as Guha claims, then this indictment of
the book would at once be a serious indictment of its faithful readers. And
not just of its actual readers, a minority of RSS activists, but of
everyone alleged by Guha to be an obedient reader, including Narendra Modi.

Now to the
contents of Guha’s advice to Modi. It is a doubtful trait of Hinduism that
in can reconcile contrasting entities. At best, this means finding common
ground underneath a seeming opposition. But often it means untruthfully
papering over real conflicts of interest. Hence Guha’s suspicion that Modi
juxtaposes these three characters on his home altar yet is unable to
reconcile their worldviews. To reconcile Golwalkar with Gandhi is not so
bizarre, they actually have fundamental traits in common, as argued above.
To reconcile Ambedkar with Gandhi is already harder, though this is a
couple whose like-mindedness Guha seems to take for granted; in fact, they
had a sharp conflict between them, which neither of them had with
Golwalkar. Not only was their outlook on both religion and modernization
very different (rationalist versus crassly sentimental), but they actually
clashed on what to Guha is clearly the most important topic in the universe:
caste. However, the real challenge here is to reconcile Ambedkar with
Golwalkar.

Well, first off,
they were both ardent nationalists. Even when Ambedkar collaborated with
the foreign occupiers of his country by serving on the Viceroy’s Council, he
did so because in his judgment, British rule was best for his country, and
in particular for his own Depressed Castes constituency. It is to
Jawaharlal Nehru’s credit that he took Ambedkar, who had been his opponent
during the Freedom Struggle, into his first national cabinet so that the
country could avail of his service. His rejection of the Christian missionary
seduction in favour of Swadeshi Buddhism was nationalist par excellence. It
did not endear him to Golwalkar in so far as we know, but it won him the
sympathy of the later RSS including Narendra Modi. To some, this element of
nationalism is less essential, but to RSS men, it is all-important.

Secondly, while
Ambedkar was more emphatically egalitarian than Golwalkar, the latter’s
nationalism equally had egalitarian implications. In the feudal system, the
nobility was not tied to a nation. Till today, the remaining royal
dynasties in Europe are biologically the most pan-European families. By
contrast, the commoners were mostly tied to a particular nation and easily
rallied around the banner of the modern nation-states. Moreover,
nationalism allowed those commoners to feel equal to their upper-class
compatriots. And historically, it is nationalism, frst through the
initiative of Otto van Bismarck, that created a social security system and
its consequent strong bond of self-interest between the commoners and their
nation. Likewise, even if Golwalkar was a Brahmin (and already for that
reason fated to be forever hated by the Ambedkarites and the foreign India-watchers
in their pocket), he advocated a common identification of everyone with the
nation, regardless of caste.

Contrary to the
secularists’ hazy assumption, Hindu Nationalism is distinct from Hindu
Traditionalism, and the central point of contrast is precisely caste. Genealogically,
in the 1920s Hindu Nationalism sprang from Hindu reformism as incarnated in
the Arya Samaj, intended as a stalwart Hindu movement (“back to the
Vedas!”), but emphatically anti-caste. The foundational insight of this
Vedic egalitarianism was that Vedic society had no castes,-- which is
accurate at least for the age of the Rg-Vedic Family Books. Several leading
early Hindu Nationalists had been Arya Samajis. The main self-imposed task
of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS was Hindu “self-organization”, Sangathan. This was the practical
application of Swami Shraddhananda’s book Hindu Sangathan, Saviour of the Dying Race (1924). If one book
can make you understand modern Hindu activism in general, of which Hindu
Nationalism and a fortiori the RSS is only one current, it is that one, far
more than Bunch of Thoughts. But
Swami Shraddhananda, murdered by a Muslim in 1926, had been a radically
anti-caste Arya Samaji.

Undoubtedly,
Ramachandra Guha’s comment has the merit of drawing attention to Guru
Golwalkar’s main political manifesto. However, to a moderate extent, it
suffers from the main flaws of the Nehruvian depiction of Hindu
Nationalism. Based on a very hazy knowledge of the facts on the ground
within the Hindu movement, it cultivates a stereotypical enemy-image. It
also conflates very distinct strands, such as Hindu traditionalism vs.
Hindu reformism, and anachronistically takes past states of affairs to be
still in force. It further imagines the Hindu movement to be a powerhouse
and fails to realize its weaknesses.

KE QUOTE: "The Jewish Bible has a doctrine of domination too, but only of the Promised Land; while the Quran speaks of world domination...Christianity does have an ambition of world domination too"

The idea is misinterpreted as world domination or land domination of some religion or nation representing it. It actually represents the world domination of their own supreme God, the only one qualified to dominate or rule over all (creation).

All of these Gods are manifestations of the Supreme, thus representing aspects of the same Deity.

KE QUOTE: "it is the spirit (viz. of charity) that counts, not the letter of the law."

What is closer or more relevant to you, your own spirit or some idea/rule written on a piece of paper?

KE QUOTE: "it is not India that the Christians want to destroy, but Hinduism."

Why such generalizations? Perhaps only the more radical persons may desire what you mention, likely due to own blindness and misunderstanding.

KE QUOTE: "Like in Islam, all non-believers are deemed to go to hell, though few Christians now take this seriously anymore."

If you believe in God, you get closer to God. The lesser your belief, the farther away you will be, the more hopeless or negative your life becomes. Hell may be viewed as the brahmajyoti effulgence or (materialistic) worlds bathed in it.

Christians simply do not know what to make of it, so they just avoid or ignore the issue.

KE QUOTE: "Jesus’ injunction to “go and teach all nations” means that India too is on Christianity’s conversion programme. "

Teaching does not mean forcing, it means spreading their view (or truth) to whomever wants to listen. Notice that the same happens when Gurus from India start preaching abroad. Both are fine, both will have their audience, both may coexist peacefully. Both are actually useful in bringing these nations closer together, it makes them less likely to wage wars against each other.

Excellent article but judging from the comments few have read it. I think you are right when you say, "Ploughing through demanding books is only given to few, among ethnicities mainly the Chinese, Northern Europeans and Jews, and even there not exactly the majority." Perhaps things will change for the better with Hindus and then your blog posts will be part of the reading!

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.